On James and the Other Brothers of a Possibly Historic Jesus

It’s fascinating to me that the early Christian church experienced a very early schism practically identical to that between Sunni and Shia Muslims, that between the Jewish Christian James the Just Jerusalem tradition, dynastic, based on leadership by physical descendants of Jesus, and the Pauline – Catholic Roman line that attained control in 325 A.D., at the Council of Nicaea, which insisted on Apostolic succession based on insistence on the ever-virgin Mary.

While initially one would believe it was not as violent as its Islamic counterpart based on current events, it appears that the struggle was much more deadly, with the followers of the Jerusalem Church dynastic tradition not only being physically exterminated but even their history being expunged; … until fairly recently.

Heresy as a crime doesn’t always work, although it’s still in use today, not only among radical fundamentalist religions, but among the so called democracies of the West, where it is formally illegal to hold certain beliefs or opinions, and of course, related research into the veracity of certain proclaimed historical truths is also proscribed.
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